Messenger 93

by Barbara Radecki

  “Whoa.” Gray made a show of being blown away, then he gave me a lopsided grin. “So I guess you want some?”

  I had to force my voice to sound as normal as possible. “Cocoa sounds amazing.”

  “Cool. I’ll put water on to boil after we eat. Cocoa’s over there.” He smiled and pointed to where he’d laid out all our stuff to dry. His blank mask was there, found at the bottom of my backpack, and so was the Jocelyn poster I’d folded up and brought along.

  I was so giddy that I picked up the mask and held it against my face. “Better?” I peered at him through the eyeholes. But I could hardly see him. The mask felt uncomfortable against my skin. My voice sounded hollow. I remembered why he’d had to buy it — For the invisible girls who disappear off our streets every day. If they’re nobody, I’m nobody — and felt stupid. I didn’t have to check with him to know it wasn’t a joke.

  “Sorry,” I said, hiding the mask and the Jocelyn poster back inside my bag. “I don’t know why I brought them.”

  He swirled the pot. “It’s okay — it sort of feels like they should be here.”

  I picked up a pouch of cocoa and a thermal cup and joined him again. I yanked at the packaging, but it wouldn’t tear and he took it from me without making a big deal and pulled out his knife and used it to slice into the foil.

  “Thanks,” I said as he poured the cocoa powder into the cup.

  He turned the knife over in his hands and considered the sharp-angled blade. “I guess I didn’t actually buy it for camping … for food …” I remembered our encounter at City Hall. How I’d made him justify himself. “I guess I bought it for, you know … wild bears and psychos …” His lips twitched into a wry smile. A private smile. “But Arthur told me carrying a knife for protection is a ‘naïve game.’ Only works for people who know how to use one.”

  “I get it,” I said. “Probably seemed like a good idea at the time.” He looked up and we shared his smile, and it warmed me all the way through.

  Gray slid the knife back into its holster and reached into his pocket and handed me a small sewing kit. “Didn’t know this was in my supplies until this morning. Not sure if you care, but if you do —” He pointed to my coat and I saw that the left-hand pocket was flapping open. Torn from the day before. I blocked out the reason why it was torn.

  A white card-edge poked out of the ripped hole. I realized it was the photo I’d found in Krista’s locker. The one of her kissing my cheek.

  I thanked Gray and pulled off my coat.

  There was a tiny pair of scissors in the sewing kit, and their tininess was so adorable they made me want to laugh again. They made me want to want to laugh. But the giddiness was gone. Manipulating the almost-invisible needle and a half-spool of black thread, I sewed the photo back inside my pocket. I remembered how only a few days before, I’d started looking for Krista with that strange and certain feeling that I was onto something. But that feeling was gone. Instead there was a weird queasiness that didn’t make sense. I used the tiny scissors to snip the thread, and couldn’t stop thinking of Krista’s last text. The scissors, the stars.

  I showed Gray my terrible sewing job and laughed too loudly and said something that probably made no sense. Anything to crowd out the unthinkable thought, anything to crush it down. That I was in the wrong place. For the wrong reason.

  2

  THIS TIME I WORE the right clothes to walk. Walter’s borrowed wool underwear, his rain pants cinched tight around my waist, my raincoat zipped over it. We used the GPS on Gray’s phone to orient ourselves and saw that we were still a few hours walk from Deerhead.

  “Shouldn’t we look for the girls as we go?” I said. “Places they could be hiding out. Or …” I didn’t want to mention any dire possibility.

  “I thought we’d ask in Deerhead and go from there,” Gray said, leading the way through the woods.

  “But Deerhead is just a starting point. What if it was Jocelyn in that car they saw a few days ago? Maybe they were driving to or from someplace around here. Wouldn’t it make sense to search the area?”

  “You mean, like, spy on people?”

  “Did anyone say what kind of car it was?”

  “A blue Chevy sedan. Older model.”

  “So we can look for one of those.”

  “One small problem with that,” he said, teasing it out like a joke. “It might not be the best idea for me to lurk around on private property. You heard what happens out here to kids who look like me, right?”

  I cringed. How could I dispute him?

  But what if the girls were actually somewhere close by?

  As if he were reading my mind, Gray said, “Do you really think there’s a chance Jocelyn and your sister are together?”

  Everything felt very fragile, like the world could collapse at the slightest touch.

  Did I really think it was possible?

  I said, “It would be weird if they’re together, wouldn’t it?”

  “If your messages take us to them and they’re together, that would be —” He shook his head, trying to imagine it. Then he mimed bowing down to me.

  I shoved his arm. It felt good to touch him, to have the right. Like we belonged to each other somehow. The only thing I wanted was to keep walking with him. No, what I wanted more than anything was for him to touch me like he had the night before. To feel the wonder again of him looking only at me.

  “It could go either way,” I said, giving him a smile despite all the problems. “Either it’s true. Or I’m crazy.”

  “My dad once told me this theory that every person is just a projection of ourselves.”

  “You mean, like, we’re all the same underneath?”

  “No. He meant, everyone you see is you. Good, bad, random. You are everyone.”

  “Whoa.” I let it blow my mind. “Do you believe that?”

  He laughed. “I don’t even understand it.”

  I laughed with him and it felt so good. So light.

  “Honestly,” he said, glancing at me, grinning, “I think it’s cool to have something nice to believe in.”

  That made me feel even lighter. Yes, me too.

  “The messages you’re getting — They’re positive, right?” he said. “They’re not telling you to burn shit down.” He gave me a grave look. “Are they?”

  “No!” The thought that I could burn something down was mildly terrifying. “Ever hear of Joan of Arc? She thought God spoke to her. That she was supposed to bring messages to help win the war. She was super-revered. But then the enemy caught her — and they burned her alive at the stake.”

  Gray clutched his chest. “That is disgusting.”

  “I know! It’s like everyone who thinks they have some special gift and then tries to help ends up dying this gruesome death. Like, what does that mean?”

  “White savior,” Gray said under his breath.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “No, what? Tell me.”

  “There’s this thing. It’s, like, you feel good helping people, so you keep up a system where people need to be helped. Instead of fixing the problem and taking on whatever or whoever is in power, you go around saving victims. Usually those victims aren’t white, which keeps the system going. You decide you always know best, that your way is always right. So really — you’re part of the reason nothing changes.”

  “Is that what you think I’m doing?”

  He brushed a strand of hair from my cheek. “There are girls missing, so …” He got quiet and walked on and I stumbled to keep up.

  I thought about Jocelyn and how I didn’t know anything about her. I thought about Krista. She was invisible to me. An enemy. And what about the hundreds of other mysterious people who crossed my path, who I was afraid of seeing? More ideas than human beings.

  Then there was me. What did I really
know about her?

  “Okay,” Gray said, startling me out of my thoughts. “Let’s look for the girls on the way. Eliminate possibilities.”

  WE STARTED TO SPY on people’s properties. Instead of using the roads, we walked along back boundaries, following whatever fencing they had, on the lookout for any sign of the girls, for an old blue Chevy.

  I wanted badly to hold Gray’s hand, but we were walking too fast and our backpacks were too heavy. I stared a lot at the back of his head as he led the way.

  We spied on tiny bungalows with swing sets on clear-cut lawns. We spied on working farms with vast planted fields and stalled animals. We spied on boarded-up vacation homes. We spied on expensive, expansive retreats and broken-down, abandoned shacks. Sometimes we had to trespass and crawl through scrub and bush until we got close enough to investigate. If there was no vehicle in the driveway, we’d watch anyway, and then eliminate them for no other reason than we had a feeling the girls weren’t there. We wished out loud that we had proper surveillance equipment. Binoculars, for instance. It would’ve made things so much faster and easier. Safer. One property at a time, we made our way, somehow unnoticed, unheeded.

  There was never any sign of Krista or Jocelyn or Vivvie or her cousins. And no sign of any old blue Chevy.

  We saw only one actual person — a middle-aged white guy in a bathrobe and slippers shoving a sagging bag of garbage into a bin outside his house. His house was a long, narrow mobile home propped on concrete blocks surrounded by forest. His car was an ancient minivan, the kind soccer moms used to drive. We settled in to spy on him just in case.

  What did he do all day, I wondered after he went back inside his house. There was nothing here but wilderness and sky. How did he fill the time? The loneliness?

  Gray and I were hiding in a maze of trees, crouched on top of a thick mat of pine needles. Our shoulders were touching. It was a warm day and birds chirped around us, so many different songs I’d never heard before. It was easy to forget the seriousness of why we were there. To slip out of the big picture and into the extreme close-up of those moments. Maybe Gray felt it too because he turned to me and we stared at each other. I didn’t know what was supposed to happen next. Even that bewildering dizziness was better than everything else.

  Then something huge and dark burst from the mobile home like a bear from a cave. It was yowling and grunting like a bear.

  Gray and I jerked to our feet.

  It was the man, still in his bathrobe and slippers, shouting without words, lumbering towards us. Holding a shotgun.

  I stumbled away. My legs gave out. Wobbled and caved under my body. I staggered to the nearest tree. Gray was stumbling too. Both of us too shocked to move properly. Too scared.

  There was an epic howl behind us. It burst and echoed like a cannon.

  Somehow we both managed to push upright. We grabbed hands and push-pulled each other through the woods. We could hear him behind us crashing over the brush. We urged our bodies on, winding through the forest, bashing past trees, aiming for imaginary paths.

  There was a loud pop and then a crack and shatter of bark over our heads.

  I stumbled again, muscles melting from fear, almost useless. The lurching huff of Gray’s breath over my shoulder kept me going.

  There was another pop, and another. Bark cracked and splintered. Scattered like fireworks.

  The ground sloped downwards into a valley. We slipped and stumbled along a narrowing track. By the time the path dipped into an even narrower gulley, it was too late. Gray and I were stuck running between two sharp rises of moss-covered rock.

  “Help us,” I begged the crow under my heaving breath, my arms and legs urging and pumping. “Please help us.” There was no answer. Only an indifferent gulley of shadows and rock. Nowhere to go but forward.

  Then a ridge of light opened up through the rocky path ahead of us.

  We ran hard, harder, until we burst out of the shade and almost stepped right onto a two-lane highway. On the other side of the road was a sheer wall of rock rising up like a warehouse.

  We checked east. There was a car approaching along the westbound lane. Gray elbowed me and we both stopped. There was something about the way it drove that made us not want to run out and hail it. It was moving way too slowly, braking almost to a stop, driving a bit farther on, then slowing down again. It was quite far off, but there was definitely a glint of a siren on its roof. A patrol vehicle on the lookout for something or someone.

  Maybe Krista was up north and they were close to finding her. Or maybe they were finally looking for Jocelyn. Or Vivvie and her cousins. Or a serial killer on the run and on the verge of being caught.

  We checked the other way. A pickup was approaching on the eastbound.

  Gray pulled me away from the mouth of the gulley so we could hide in the scrub on the shoulder. We couldn’t cross the road and keep running — the rock-face on the other side was too steep. We couldn’t hail either vehicle — we weren’t ready to be found. We couldn’t turn back into the gulley — trigger-happy sniper might still be chasing us. Might turn us in. Might shoot us in front of the law.

  Time clicked into slow motion as the eastbound pickup neared us. We took in the driver — a skinny youngish guy with long loose hair and an easy grin on his face. No one beside him in the passenger seat.

  His expression shifted as he registered the patrol vehicle coming towards him. His pickup decelerated abruptly as it passed us — so close I could have thrown a rock in the bed. But the bed was already occupied. A silver-and-black husky with silver eyes. Five dark heads beside her, five small faces peering out, one girl wearing a white-sequined vest.

  Gray shot up, and just as quickly I yanked him down.

  Vivvie’s face lit up and she craned over the side of the truck. She had seen us. She flung out her hand — about to bang on the window of the cab.

  In the other direction, the patrol vehicle was closing in. Slowing, rolling to speed, slowing again. Heading straight for us.

  Gray and I shook our heads at Vivvie: Don’t give us up.

  The pickup was traveling away from us now, closing in on the patrol car. Vivvie saw it. She understood why we were hiding: in a few short moments we were going to get caught, dragged home, rescue mission aborted.

  She stood up in the bed. Her husky stood up beside her. Her cousins were waving their hands, saying things we couldn’t hear.

  There was a split-second when the truck was parallel with the patrol car. And just as they passed each other, the husky leapt out of the back of the truck and onto the hood of the cruiser.

  We could hear the thud even from where we were. The patrol car squealed to a stop and the husky slumped against the windshield, slid down the hood, and landed on the pavement.

  She will fall.

  The sound of the girls screaming pierced the air.

  The pickup immediately braked and then pulled to a crooked stop on the shoulder.

  Gray scuttled through the scrub towards them, ducking down so he’d stay hidden. I jumped up and followed, crouching as low as I could too, taking a few glances over my shoulder to make sure the gunslinger wasn’t on our heels.

  The troopers got out of the car. Two uniformed men wearing black aviator sunglasses.

  There was a lot of yelling. The officers, the girls, the pickup driver who’d gotten out of his cab. He was holding his hair tight off his face in agonized surprise. One officer went to the husky — Kimi — and bent over her and put his hands on her chest.

  Vivvie jumped out of the bed of the truck. She was yelling and tried to push the officer away. He didn’t budge, but focused his attention on Kimi while the other officer went over to talk to the pickup driver.

  Gray and I scooted closer so we could hear their voices.

  “I was just taking the kids to Deerhead,” the pickup driver was saying, his voice loud
and plaintive. “They said they were lost and needed to get back to their families.”

  The officer said something, but his voice was so low I couldn’t make it out. The driver responded with his loud, despairing voice, “But I couldn’t leave them on the side of the road, could I? Is that what you’re saying I shoulda done?”

  The officer responded, again too low. He motioned down the road the way the driver had come. Vivvie and her cousins were crouched in a circle around the dog, laying gentle hands on her belly, crying and swiping at their eyes and noses.

  “No, no, let me help!” the driver was saying. “I’ll drive back your way. We can put the dog in my bed. I can take a coupla girls.”

  The officer who’d been crouched with Kimi stood up and he and the other officer conferred for a bit. Then they turned to the driver and said something we couldn’t hear. There was an immediate flurry of activity. The door to the pickup bed was popped down and an emergency blanket was pulled from the patrol vehicle. All three men went to Kimi and all five girls stood and gave them room. The men very gently, very quickly, wrapped Kimi in the blanket and hoisted her up off the ground. The dog’s eyes were open, her tongue was out. She was panting. Quick, shallow breaths. She was alive.

  The bed door was slammed shut. Then three girls — the twins and the child-mom — were ushered into the back of the patrol vehicle. The two other kids — the girl/boy and Vivvie — ran to the passenger side of the pickup while the driver got into the driver’s seat. The officers got back into their vehicle and waited while the pickup driver started up and slowly pulled a U-turn on the highway, then headed west the way he’d come. The officers pulled out after him and both vehicles drove off down the westbound lane.

  When the pickup passed, Vivvie was staring at us out the back window of the cab. She pressed a finger against the window and her mouth circled into a pleading O. Go!

  Go! Don’t stop until you find Jocelyn.

  At least the girls had been found, I thought as I watched them drive away. Saved by Kimi. Who had saved us too.